Men At Arms – Evelyn Waugh, 1952 ★★★★

War Is Swell

Which post-World War II Anglo-Catholic trilogy you prefer may depend on whether you are a glass-half-empty/full kind of person. Young at heart? Positive thoughts? Faith in a greater good undergirded by a sense of better times ahead? Have a look at J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, if you haven’t already.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming – Ben Fong-Torres, 1998 ★★

Reeling in the Ears

Once upon a time radio could sell anything: Stereos, pimple cream, Starland Vocal Band, New Coke. Then rap came to crush our aural unification. At least that’s my take from this pleasant if tepid account of Top 40 radio’s heyday in the second half of the last century.

Ben Fong-Torres, a former editor for Rolling Stone magazine perhaps best known as a character in the movie Almost Famous, pulls together people and places from four decades of Top 40 radio dominance, from the birth of rock n’ roll to the emergence of modern-day narrow-casting which sped its demise.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1982 – Bill James, 1982 ★★½

Behold My Greatest Treasure

The Gutenberg Bible of my old book collection, it turns out, is not a first-edition Notes Of A War Correspondent (1898) by Richard Harding Davis, nor the autographed hardcover autobiography Minnie Pearl. Rather, it’s a slim paperback written by a cannery security guard turned baseball-numbers geek.

Grifter's Game – Lawrence Block, 1961 ★★

Pulp Does as Pulp Is

Paperback readers want simplicity. Never mind flowery titles; give ‘em a generic description with an author’s name up front. Call it Nelson DeMille’s Globetrotting With Guns V or Dan Brown’s Made-Up Historical Facts To Play With Your Head IV. Makes choosing easier.

The Best Humor Annual – Edited by Louis Untermeyer & Ralph E. Shikes, 1952 ★

Laffs on Not Quite Every Page

Read some old books, and you wonder what they ever did to deserve consignment to a quick obscurity. Other old books show Father Time tough but fair. Take this exhaustive but underwhelming compendium of humorous writings published in 1951-1952.

The Blue Lotus – Hergé, 1936 [Revised 1946] ★★½

Tintin Goes Long

When Tintin fans talk about the greatness of the comic series, one oft-cited exhibit is The Blue Lotus, an ambitious tale set before World War II that sets the intrepid Belgian reporter against the international drug trade and Japan’s conquest of China.

For me, it’s a meh experience. I see what admirers mean when they talk about Hergé’s emerging artistry and storycraft. But I have never really taken to the work the way I have to other, less-touted installments of the series.

Coriolanus – William Shakespeare, c. 1609 ★★★

John Galt in a Toga

Any Shakespeare play that leaves people with totally different interpretations regarding the nature of the lead character can’t be all bad.

The first time I read Coriolanus was in college. A kindly professor laid out the case for seeing Coriolanus as a kind of fascist strongman brought down by his contempt for the people. I went away comforted in my small-L liberalism. The next time I read it, it was hard not to see Coriolanus as something else entirely, a deserving member of the meritocracy brought down by an envious, parasitic mob moved by envy, not need. In short, John Galt in a toga.

Target Blue: An Insider's View Of The NYPD – Robert Daley, 1973 ★★★½

Walking the Thin Blue Line

You are the new liberal police commissioner of the biggest, toughest city in America, and want a fresh look for your scandal-ridden department. So you give a local reporter a gun and a badge and tell him he’s now your deputy commissioner. What do you think happens next?

The Story Of American Golf: Its Champions And Its Championships – Herbert Warren Wind, 1956 ★★★★

Before Arnie Came

Golf’s elitist tag is long out of date; it was back in 1980 when Caddyshack came out but lingers still. Yes, the sport can be expensive and there are clubs for rich golfers only, but so what? They have clubs like that for other sports like tennis and swimming; no one considers those pastimes “exclusive.”

Another ugly word may have more merit in its application: Stodgy. People associate golf with tradition, with a sense of personal honor bordering on rectitude, and with boring stories told by a crusty old-timer who rounds his vowels like John Houseman. If you were to imagine a book written by such a fellow, it might well resemble something like what’s before us today.

Different Seasons – Stephen King, 1982 ★★★★

Reclaiming the Lost Art of the Novella

During his first seven years as America’s biggest-selling author, Stephen King took readers into all kinds of forbidden, frightening territory. Haunted hotels, apocalyptic ruins, teenage hormones, he ran the gamut. In 1982, King ventured into a dead zone of a different kind: Novellas.

The Interpreter – Alice Kaplan, 2005 ★★½

Separate and Unequal

Two different American armies marched through France in World War II, united only in name. One was all-white, the other black troops led by mostly white officers. An injustice in itself, the practice led to other kinds of injustice that is the subject of this book.

The Interpreter presents two cases in which a Frenchman was shot to death by an American soldier. One killer was African-American, the other white. The black killer was hung for his crime. The white killer went free.

Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories – Edited by Nahum N. Glatzre, 1971 ★★

Kafka: Thinking Outside the Bug

The term “Kafkaesque” is part of our language. What does it mean? This comprehensive collection of Franz Kafka’s short fiction begs more questions than it answers.

One common definition is “darkly surreal.” In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s best-known story and one included in this book, a guy wakes up one morning to discover he is a giant bug. Dark and surreal, right?

The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album – Matt Groening, 1991 ★★★½

The Way They Was

You can’t hurl a dead Snowball I across the internet without hitting an online debate around the question: When did the longest-running sitcom in American history jump the shark? Everyone knows “The Simpsons” today is no longer the show it was; when did the rot set in?

As a former bigtime Simpsons fan whose devotion fled sometime between the rise of Britney Spears and the fall of Enron, I feel I have company in my lack of clarity. Some cite specific episodes as their turn-off points; for me it is not that simple. Re-discovering the early Simpsons, in the form of this tie-in book published in the second year of their 28-years-and-counting run, brought that home.

The Black Mountain – Rex Stout, 1954 [No Stars]

A Mountain Not Worth Climbing

There are two kinds of challenges reading a mystery novel. One is figuring out the guilty party. The other is soldiering through when the plot doesn’t gel, characters are dense and/or unsympathetic, the setting is bland and thin, and you don’t give a damn whodunit. The Black Mountain proved a textbook example of this latter experience.

The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes In French Cultural History – Robert Darnton, 1984 ★★

How the Past Is a Foreign Country

As a product of the 20^th century who finds himself deep into the 21^st, I know a little about temporal dislocation. Whether it’s the politics, the music, or adjusting to casual swearing, mobile texting, or calorie-count signs at McDonalds, it’s like my head is in then; my body in now.

Imagine trying to make sense of a time that exists entirely outside living memory. This is the challenge Robert Darnton takes on in this collection of historical-anthropological essays looking back at 18^th century France.

Icebreaker – John Gardner, 1983 [No Stars]

007 Faces His Greatest Threat...a Sneering Novelist

Who in their right minds hires a novelist to flip off his audience?

In the early 1980s, the answer to the above question was Glidrose Publications Ltd. A production company owned by the family of Ian Fleming, Glidrose held literary title to Fleming’s famous fictional spy, James Bond. To carry on the Bond novels after Fleming’s death, they contracted a novelist, one John Gardner. By the time of his third Bond novel, Icebreaker, it had become clear Gardner not only disliked James Bond the character, but resented his audience, too.

Trade Him! – Edited by Jim Enright, 1976 ★½

Wheeling and Dealing as Strength and (Mostly) Weakness

Two bad things came out of being a New York Mets fan this season. The first was watching my team stumble out of the gate and never right itself. The second came later, as the injury-riddled franchise traded off name players with expiring contracts in hope of getting something – anything – in return.

Such is the nature of the market. It wasn’t always so. In the old days, baseball trades were not about heading off free-agency but establishing, or maintaining, franchise relevance in a Darwinian world of rapidly-aging stars and diamonds in the rough. In those days, baseball executive Branch Rickey opined: “It’s better to trade a player one year too soon than one year too late.”

It was the sort of world captured, if fitfully and vaguely, in this 1976 collection of essays about famous baseball trades compiled and edited by Jim Enright.

And Tyler Too – Robert Seager II, 1963 ★★★½

Evaluating America's Imperfect 10

Try naming American presidents, and chances are good you stumble on “Tyler.” Was his first name “James” or “John?” Was he president before or after Millard Fillmore? The kids at Springfield Elementary School on “The Simpsons” once did a musical number about “caretaker presidents.” Sure enough, he gets a mention:

There’s Taylor/There’s Tyler/There’s Fillmore and there’s Hayes/There’s William Henry Harrison/‘I died in thirty days.’

Cigars Of The Pharaoh – Hergé, 1934 [Revised 1955] ★★★

Learning Elephant in Four Easy Pages

The magic of life one experiences as a child dissipates too quickly, to the point where it can be hard to recall, let alone recapture. At least I have found it so. Finding artists who don’t seem at all encumbered by adulthood that way is thus a rare pleasure. Such is my feeling for Hergé.

Casablanca: Behind The Scenes – Harlan Lebo, 1992 ★★★

Making Hollywood Hokum for the Ages

Watching Casablanca, it’s easy to grasp its elemental appeal. Snappy dialogue, compelling characters, a suspense-rich environment, beautiful images, a wow finish. But how did it all come to be? Harlan Lebo examines the film’s origins and lasting success in this 1992 book.

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner, 1930 ★½

Adrift with the Bundrens

“Pa never does nothing, Sis will do anything for an abortion, my brothers are all deranged, and my mother is a fish.” Sounds like a Jerry Springer episode, right?

The fifth novel by William Faulkner, and the third set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, As I Lay Dying is famous for its subjective-perspective, stream-of-consciousness narration. It might be just as notable for a unique set of low-life characters who dare you to like any of them once you manage to work out what is happening. I still flail futilely in both departments.

Mary Through The Centuries – Jaroslav Pelikan, 1996 ★★

Immaculate, Maybe; Inflexible, Never

Jesus may be the basis of Christianity, Paul its founder, and Peter its rock, but if there is one enigma in the faith’s hierarchy, it is neither man nor God but rather a woman who stands alone not only for her proximity to divinity, but for her singular involvement in its creation.

The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy, 1987 ★★½

Cruising for Danger with James Ellroy

James Ellroy is the most dangerous man in fiction, sometimes even to himself.

In this, the novel that made him what he is, Ellroy beats himself up over the real-life death of his mother by recasting her as the mystery woman of the novel’s title and delving into both the gruesome facts of her torture-slaying and the dark obsession she triggers in our two main male characters, Ellroy stand-ins both. It was Ellroy’s seventh crime-fiction novel; this time it was personal:

Wings Of Morning – Thomas Childers, 1995 ★★

"A Very Unnatural Way to Live"

Bomber duty in World War II left a particularly grim shadow. For those who served, life ground down into long stretches of tedium jabbed by bursts of tension and fear; and occasionally a hard, fiery death. The utter randomness of it all, dropping bombs on unseen targets and being potted at by flak guns, must have been cosmically unsettling. Its sense of absurdity would be encapsulated in a novel written by one bombardier veteran called Catch-22.

Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard, 1992 ★★★★

The Ups and Downs of Playing to Type

There is a pernicious notion I want to stomp out every time I scan Elmore Leonard novel reviews on Amazon.com: that each book of his is like every other, an interchangeable collection of hard guys and clever women who say funny things while circling each other like sharks looking for an opening to a big score.

Cobb: A Biography – Al Stump, 1994 ★★½

Printing the Legend

In a sport that attracts difficult personalities, Tyrus Raymond Cobb stands alone. He abused teammates, punched out umpires, spiked opponents, waded through a crowd to thrash a disabled fan, and showcased a hatred for black people so vicious it upset his fellow whites even in a more racist time.

The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens, 1836-37 ★★★★

Where's the Love for Mr. Pickwick?

Few novelists burst out of the gate with such energy and creativity, or garner such immediate popular acclaim, as did Charles Dickens. Reading The Pickwick Papers makes the case for instant greatness. It remains a marvel in terms of distance traveled, people met, and milieus satirized.

The Passion Of Fulton Sheen – D. P. Noonan, 1972 ★

Enough of Fulton, Let's Talk about Me!

A challenge in writing these reviews is making it about the matter in hand, and not my feelings about a particular subject. It’s a challenge Rev. D. P. Noonan doesn’t just fail but blows completely past in this, his book-long review of the life of one of a man once widely known as “God’s press agent.”

The Negotiator – Frederick Forsyth, 1989 ★★

A Plot that Got Away

What happens when dark forces buried deep inside the leadership of two superpowers simultaneously plot to take control of the world’s major oil producers? The same thing that happens when an author takes on a story too convoluted and ambitious for his own good: total chaos.

Movie Stars, Real People, And Me – Joshua Logan, 1978 ★★

Hollywood Tell-All, Take Two

Joshua Logan forged a successful career repurposing the tried-and-true into fresh entertainments. Here we get to see him work the same crafty mojo on himself.

Two years after publishing his show-business memoir, Josh: My Up And Down, In And Out Life, the celebrated producer-director returned in 1978 with another show-business memoir. This time, his focus is on anecdotes about Hollywood’s rich and famous; actors like Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Bette Davis; producers like Sam Goldwyn; directors like Mel Brooks.

Even Princess Margaret puts in an appearance. What’s not to love?

Wanderer Of The Wasteland – Zane Grey, 1923 ★½

Lost in the Desert

Just as the American West proved a land of reinvention for generations of European migrants, so would it be for many Western authors. Of all the fiction writers who focused their talents on six-guns and stampedes, none exercised a license for reinvention quite like Zane Grey.

Alexander Hamilton – Ron Chernow, 2004 ★★★★

Celebrating America's Own Alexander the Great

Dying on the battlefield was a fate avoided by the major figures of the American Revolution, unless you extend that battlefield to one of ideals. That was my core takeaway reading Ron Chernow’s bestselling biography on Alexander Hamilton, who survived the war only to die in a brave, bizarre duel over political differences 21 years later.

Me And Hitch – Evan Hunter, 1997 ★★★

Two for the Birds

The movie business makes for strange bedfellows. How else to explain the collaboration of Evan Hunter, gritty, streetwise creator of The Blackboard Jungle and the 87^th Precinct series of police procedurals under the penname “Ed McBain”; with that genteel and sophisticated Master of the Macabre himself, Alfred Hitchcock? Hardly birds of a feather, but what about results?

Tintin In America – Hergé, 1932 [Revised 1945] ★½

Dawn's Early Light

No great artist should be judged by their earliest published work; when plying one’s craft it takes time to develop a signature style and voice. You might think such consideration a bit much when said creation involves popular entertainment aimed mainly at children. But in such a case achieving the right calibrations can be even harder.

Case in point: The legendary Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

The Derby – Bill Levy, 1967 ★★½

The Most Exciting 200 Minutes of Sports

Since 1875, the Kentucky Derby has been drawing the greatest race horses ever known. Okay, not Man O’ War or Seabiscuit, or famous 20^th century racehorses outside North America. But hundreds of top American thoroughbreds have beaten their hooves along the dirt track of Churchill Downs for what is often called “the most exciting two minutes of sports.” After nearly 100 years of this, Bill Levy wrote a coffee-table book commemorating the event.

The Playboy Interviews With John Lennon & Yoko Ono – David Sheff, 1981 ★★★½

No Time for Fussing and Fighting

John Lennon had the most fascinating life of any ex-Beatle, despite it being so much shorter. In a succession of distinct if not exclusive public identities, he went from blissful dreamer to tortured artist to committed radical to party-hearty studio rat and finally bread-baking papa. Much of that time he was in the company of his lover Yoko Ono, a conceptual artist who saw in John’s celebrity an opportunity to advance big ideas and challenge stereotypes.

Masterpieces Of Mystery: The Golden Age, Part I – Compiled by Ellery Queen, 1977 ★★

What Was So Golden about the Golden Age?

Detective fiction long ago moved from the whodunit to the whydunit; today it often employs a complicated, psychological approach. So what can be learned from this anthology of mystery writers from its simpler Golden Age?

Do any of them still stand up to modern scrutiny, apart from Agatha Christie, still the reigning Shakespeare of the form? After reading through these 350 pages, I’m still wondering.

The Bastard – John Jakes, 1974 ★★★½

Come for the Sex, Stay for the Revolution

Sex sells. That’s an idea as old as history itself. Sex sells even when the subject is history, as John Jakes amply demonstrated with the release of this, the first of eight lusty novels tracing the history of an American family spreading their seed from just before the American Revolution to the dawn of the 20^th century.

Hitler's Spies – David Kahn, 1978 ★★

Keeping Hitler in the Dark

Titles are funny things. Sometimes they are disarmingly bland, suggesting nothing of the page-turning dynamite within.

Others are short and sweet and promise killer content, only to offer a damp squib. Such was the case with this, historian David Kahn’s promisingly-titled follow-up to his landmark examination of cryptography, The Codebreakers.

The Shawshank Redemption: A Shooting Script – Frank Darabont, 1996 ★★★½

Plotting for Hope

As revealed in the pages of this Newmarket Screenplay publication, the story of writer/director Frank Darabont resembled that of the protagonist of this, his breakout film, one Andy Dufresne. When you find yourself stuck in a hole, with everyone telling you there’s no way out, don’t give up hope.

Underworld – Don DeLillo, 1997 ★★

Everyone's a Philosopher

Can reality be both random chaos and yet somehow mapped out like some endless Fibonacci sequence?

Does the idea of dancing around possible answers to that question over the course of over 40 years and 800 pages strike you as time well spent?

Well, here’s a novel that takes on the whole second half of the 20^th century as it revolved around two concurrent events, the first aerial detonation of a Soviet A-bomb and a home run that decided a National League championship.

Controversy – William Manchester, 1976 ★★½

History Is His Story

Paul McCartney had a lyric in one of his early albums, Ram. “You took your lucky break and broke it in two…” 

I kept hearing it as I read through the title essay in this collection by the noted historian William Manchester.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie, 1926 ★★★★½

Murder Most Sharp

Diabolical is the word to describe this wonderful mystery novel, as twisted as a vine and as charming as a cuckoo clock. Those who might question the notion of a tea-cozy mystery blowing a reader’s mind (much like me, back when) will most likely enjoy this happy rebuke.

Critics have called this the best of the Christie novels; many place it in the top ten of crime fiction overall. In terms of mechanical skill, there’s nothing to argue with there. Nor will I do too much explaining, it being a matter of spoilers. More even than most mysteries, you have that issue here.

The Amazing Mets – Jerry Mitchell, 1964 ★★★

How to Succeed in Baseball without Ever Winning

For very few lucky people, greatness is something that comes easy. Is it possible to say the same rule applies with ineptitude?

In the realm of professional sports, few have ever done so much with so little result, and been so celebrated in the process, as were the early New York Mets.

Capote – Gerald Clarke, 1988 ★★★½

Tracing the Fall of a Little Giant

There’s a mystery behind every great author; behind Truman Capote the mystery may simply be this: Which of his books wound up killing him?

If you accept the movie adaptation of this biography, the one which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for the title role in 2006, the villain is clearly In Cold Blood, a “nonfiction novel” whose emotionally harrowing subject matter sent the sensitive Capote over the edge.

The Mill On The Floss – George Eliot, 1860 ★★★½

A Current Affair

A great novel doesn’t have to be a fun read. In fact, a case can be made that a certain amount of reader pain is required for any literary masterpiece to be properly appreciated.

But what can you say about a book that focuses on not one, not two, but three coincidences that are each ridiculous and painful in equal measure, all of them involving the river that figures in the second half of this novel’s title?

Don’t work or live on a river if you can at all help it, I guess.

Suez To Singapore – Cecil Brown, 1942 ★★★½

Making Waves, On and Off the Air

When the H. M. S. Repulse was sunk by Japanese aircraft near Singapore less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attacks, not everyone was happy American journalist Cecil Brown was one of its survivors.

The news correspondent for CBS Radio had made plenty of enemies in Singapore, including its British commander, Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival. The officer in charge of Percival’s press office made himself conspicuous by his cold silence when Brown reported back to duty.

My Twenty-five Years In Fleetwood Mac – Mick Fleetwood, 1992 ★★½

Looking Back at "Twenty-five Years," 25 Years Later

Windsor, England is home to Great Britain’s Royal Family; half a century ago it spawned rock royalty, too. Sunday, August 13, 2017 will mark the 50^th anniversary of the debut on a Windsor stage of a blues quartet that became a pop sensation and finally a cultural institution.

Let’s jump back halfway from that auspicious day to 1992, and the publication of this scrapbook-style memoir marking the 25^th anniversary of that band, Fleetwood Mac.

The March – E. L. Doctorow, 2005 ★★½

Trudging through Georgia

The American Civil War remains a touchstone for understanding what it means to be American. Whether it’s race and regionalism, human rights and civil liberties or westward expansion and technological progress, everything that makes America American runs through the Civil War like a teeming railroad junction or the mighty Mississipp.

No wonder so many American fiction writers take a shot at writing about it.

When In Doubt, Fire The Manager – Alvin Dark & John Underwood, 1980 ★★★

Winning on a Prayer

Most celebrity autobiographies follow a common format: here are the great things I did, here’s how and why I did them, and here’s how people misinterpreted me, especially the press.

Alvin Dark was different. When he put pen to paper at the end of a long and distinguished career, his mission was telling you just where he messed up.